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Sunday 15 December 2019

But this was Boris


Many of you will know I was brought up in the Midlands. My accent tends to give my origins away!

Friends of mine from then and now recall their early years in the Midlands as a time of full employment, Marks and Spencers and expensive boutiques in our high streets, garden parties and the annual flower show in our local parks. My mother was part of the flower show committee and a member of the Towns Women’s Guild. At general elections mum often commented how the conservatives would raise money all year round and would go to vote whatever the weather. Many neighbours thought mum was a Tory voter - she was married to the grammar school head. It had escaped their notice she never attended Tory party functions. She wouldn’t: my parents NEVER voted anything other than Labour.

Mum was right about the weather affecting turn out. Something I’m sure Boris’s strategists were only too aware of when they chose a December date for this year’s general election. It has been suggested that some of the electorate in the former Labour heartland stayed at home rather than vote. It wasn’t just the cold and rain, though. They couldn’t choose between Boris or Jeremy.

My feelings about Boris and his entreaties towards voters in former Labour constituencies are that he will soon weary of them. It’s all spit and polish, style over substance. He refers to the town where he worked in the late 80s - at the newspaper offices of the Express and Star - a rag I grew up reading in the Midlands - as a ‘place called Wolverhampton’. 

"When I was a 22 or 23-year-old reporter in a place called Wolverhampton... I got impatient with some of the stuff I saw going on about damp and mould, about who is ultimately responsible for improving the ventilation in people's houses.
I felt that people were being infantilised and made dependent by the system and that the local Labour politicians had no interest in sorting it out, were content to harvest these people's votes without improving their lives.
It was the spores of damp, of mould forming on the walls in Wolverhampton.”

So that’s his recollection of Labour politicians and housing conditions in parts of the Midlands. The young Boris Johnson was a far cry from the average Express and Star newspaper reporter. Colleagues recalled he favoured wide-lapelled chalkstripe suits and silk ties.
He must have stood out.

And he’s still standing out. But, according to research at Loughborough University, he has a lot to reverse if he is to improve the lives of some of those former Labour areas:

‘More than half of children in over 200 (electoral) wards are below the poverty line...’

The research, carried out by Prof Donald Hirsh at the University of Loughborough, found the situation was getting worse in places where child poverty was already at the highest level.
    
It shows that it was 2010 when child poverty began to rise again, after a long period in which it fell.
Prof Hirsch said: "What's shocking rather than surprising is that over the previous 12 to 15 years, we had a period when it was going down...’

And we know which party got the keys to number ten in 2010. From then I knew myself how difficult things were going to be in the state sector. Our school had already suffered cuts owing to a reduced intake. When school budgets are cut it’s hard even as a head of faculty to order new biros. And the pupils I taught were not from privileged backgrounds. To give out biros was the route to getting them to write in class. They certainly wouldn’t, in the main, have their own writing implements.

I knew that with a certain type of Etonesque cabinet in government ( and I know many ex-Eton alumni - they aren’t all like Cameron et al), the promise of an austerity budget and the silliness of stating ‘we are all in it together’ - early lies from this brand of Toryism - things could only deteriorate further in our state school.

The year Cameron got in I got out.
Teaching in state schools has been in a very difficult place since 2010 and after 32 years I felt I’d done my bit. And I wasn’t prepared to lower my standards nor risk my health through overwork and poor job satisfaction. 

The NHS has been treated with just as much lack of care and budgetary constraints. I suggest we all try to stay fit and well as I for one don’t believe Boris has the answers to our overstretched NHS. Bluff, bluster and telling the people what they want to hear might get votes but I’ll be very surprised if things improve in the state sector with our man from Manhattan. 

When steel manufacture went into decline in the Midlands the land of full employment deteriorated. Despite this nosedive an entrepreneur set up shop - just off our high street - in an area called Mount Pleasant - named ‘The Perfect Lady’. She sold hats, gloves and matching scarves. It was the perfect photo opportunity for Margaret Thatcher. On her visit to our high street she posed outside ‘The Perfect Lady’ and her picture was front page news for the Express and Star. But this was post-industrial Midlands. The area was economically depressed. Thatcher went on to many other photo opportunities but ‘The Perfect Lady’ failed. The area is still depressed. But the Tories are in power. What will they do about deprivation? Have photos taken and call it work? 

This ward in the Midlands did return a Labour MP - but only just - and it shares some of the characteristics of Blyth Valley, famously one of the first constituencies to turn blue on Thursday night.

Unemployment in Blyth Valley is above the national average. That is typical of many communities in the North East that are still wrestling with the impact of industrial decline.
( BBC News)

There are similarities between post-industrial Blyth and the Midlands. Both regions need investment - not just visits and photographs. I doubt Boris knows what to do but, worse still, I doubt he cares.

But this was Boris. A man for whom other people are mere satellites orbiting his sun.
(The Guardian 5.9.19)


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